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Pregame Show: Many Hours Too Long

There have been so many overlong, silly, banal, poorly conceived Super Bowl pregame shows that only one title can describe the drivel perpetrated by Fox on Sunday:

Worst Damn Four-and-a-Half-Hour Super Bowl Show Ever.

The pacing was choppy, especially in the first 2 hours 45 minutes, to accommodate the frequent cuts to the string of red-carpet interviews. From the Super Bowl to the Kentucky Derby, networks have come to believe that the so-called casual viewer needs these inevitably stupid celebrity minichats to tune in. But in contrast with the Oscars, this tradition that should end has no clothes or jewels to ogle or style malfunctions (like Adam Sandler’s schlep-of-the-day outfit) for Joan Rivers to insult.

So when the Kia Rapping Mice sound more articulate than Harrison Ford, you’re in trouble. When you’re reduced to Jennifer Aniston’s fitting a Clay Matthews wig (and not a Troy Polamalu hairpiece) on Sandler’s head, you’re dealing in entertainment on the cheap.

One of the worst pseudojournalistic jobs on earth must be interviewing stars on the red carpet. What do you ask before the Super Bowl? Do you like football? Did you play football? Who’s going to win? That’s what Fox’s Michael Strahan and Maria Menounos of “Access Hollywood” were reduced to using for giggly conversation starters. Not once did it work.

When you conceive a show as bad as this and go to these lengths to diminish the football content for more than three hours, you overpromote the company’s wares on Fox (“The Chicago Code,” which starts Monday, and the Daytona 500), FX (“Lights Out,” “Sons of Anarchy” and “Justified”) and 20th Century Fox (the animated film “Rio,” the only film promoted on the red carpet that had a clip).

When you produce something this awful, you tend to do something laugh-out-loud dumb like the badly acted Pizza Hut commercial starring your own people (Terry Bradshaw, Howie Long and Jimmy Johnson), which ended with Bradshaw bellowing to the Fox crew waiting to be fed, “Who wants to try the new Big Dipper?” Yeah, I know Boomer Esiason crammed his mouth with Ritz crackers last year when it was CBS’s turn to strive for mediocrity in the Super Bowl pregame. What’s bad only gets worse.

We didn’t need the Super Bowl pregame return of the excitable Guy Fieri, the celebrity chef, restaurateur and NBC game-show host. He was there for CBS last year and there he was again, making meatball sliders out of Ritz crackers.

And he was able to promote his restaurant.

These distractions (wait, I forgot the unpaid ad for Menounos’s new book and where to buy it) filled the interminable hours before kickoff but hurt (and shortened) the football segments. A panel discussion of the labor crisis in the N.F.L. featured taped tidbits from Commissioner Roger Goodell and the union’s executive director, DeMaurice Smith, and would have been more meaningful if they, or players, had been shown live.

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Entertainment, however, beckoned.

A discussion with Mike Pereira, the former N.F.L. zebra-turned-Fox officiating analyst, needed more time and analysis, but the red carpet and a promo of Fox’s animated shows were calling. A discussion with the former Green Bay quarterback Bart Starr and running back Dorsey Levens would have been strengthened with an old Steeler. What came next? A Chevy Volt commercial starring Long and a Chevy robot.

A lengthy taped and live look at the legacy of the 1990s Cowboys did not need any more breathing room. But it yielded something fascinating: the bromance between the Cowboys’ owner, Jerry Jones, and Johnson, his former coach. They hugged at the end of the taped portion and after the live one as if they had never, ever quarreled.

One final thing: Curt Menefee, Fox’s host, teased viewers from early in the pregame show that the live interview (“the interview America’s been waiting for,” he said) between President Obama and Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel was coming, later, in a moment, in a few moments or sometime soon. Nearly three hours in, Obama and O’Reilly showed up. Was this Fox’s version of “The Decision”? Was there a delay at the White House? Were Obama and O’Reilly delayed smoking cigars in the Oval Office steam room? If not, viewers were badly served.

E-mail: sandor@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on February 7, 2011, on page D5 of the New York edition with the headline: Pregame Show Was Four and a Half Hours Too Long. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe